Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Egg Pirate?
(Be Afraid • Factory Food)
Check the fridge, Texans, and make sure you don’t have any Lucerne or Albertson eggs with the dates and lots enumerated in this U.S. Food & Drug Administration recall notice, because people have been getting Salmonella poisoning from eating them. The eggs were sold to a bunch of national food wholesalers and have spread nationwide.
The recall just started a day or two ago, so the media hasn’t yet noted that the corporation responsible for the tainted food, Wright County Egg of Galt, Iowa, is operated by the effervescent DeCoster family, my very favorite egg tycoons.
This yolk empire is headed by Austin “Jack” DeCoster, who was spotted hanging out in June at the Androscoggin County (Maine) district attorney’s office while Maine Contract Farming, previously named DeCoster Egg Farm, entered a guilty plea through its attorney to what was billed as the biggest (dollar-wise) settlement in America over charges of cruelty to farm animals.
DeCoster’s Wright County Egg operation has repeatedly been raided for employing illegal immigrants, including a raid in June 2006 in which 36 people were arrested.
In September of 2002, DeCoster Farms agreed to a settlement of more than $1.5 million in a lawsuit by several women who were working at the company’s Wright County egg plants and alleged sexual harassment, rape, abuse and retaliation by supervisors for the company.
And in June 2000, then-Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said Austin “Jack” DeCoster would be classified as a “habitual violator” of the state’s environmental laws and assessed a civil penalty of $150,000.
So, you know, if you find yourself hugging the porcelain convenience after ingesting a couple of Wright County’s Finest Breakfast Tacos, you can thank your lucky stars that at least you were poisoned by a professional pirate, and not some rank amateur.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 15, 2010, 05 44 PM
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O Crap!
(Be Afraid • Factory Food)
You can probably think of a few reasons why you shouldn’t be eating Campbell Soup Co.‘s SpaghettiOs With Meatballs even in their “normal” condition – starting with the taste.
But here’s another reason: The company’s Paris plant (Texas, that is, not France) forgot to turn up the heat enough to process meatballs in some of the glop. To be precise, 15 million pounds worth.
Nobody has yet proven that they threw up in response to eating the undercooked SpaghettiOs, at least any more than they would ordinarily. But in “an abundance of caution” (which means they hope to avoid lawsuits) the company has recalled the following lots:
→ 14.75-ounce cans of “SpaghettiOs” with Meatballs, bearing the identifying product code “U5” on the bottom of the can.
→ 14.75-ounce cans of “SpaghettiOs” A to Z with Meatballs, bearing the identifying product code “4N” on the bottom of the can.
→ 14.75-ounce cans of “SpaghettiOs” Fun Shapes with Meatballs (Cars), bearing the identifying product code “KS” on the bottom of the can.
No word from the Texas Department of Health as to how this might have happened. In fact, the only news over there is that they’re undergoing budget cuts, so if it’s information you’re seeking, plan on spending more time on hold than ever before and consider voting in Bill White for governor.
By the way, in case you don’t recall (pun) why it’s bad to undercook meatballs, South Gate Meat Co. of California is reminding you, by recalling 35,000 pounds of ground beef that the U.S. Department of Agriculture says may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, a bug that can do everything from making you vomit really hard to causing paralysis.
So remember: Eating food processed by big corporations is kind of like gambling in Las Vegas – only if you lose, you find yourself playing craps up in your room all by yourself.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 23, 2010, 12 03 PM
Living Better With Chemicals
(Factory Food • Ecology)
Sometimes I think Monsanto is like a big kid with a chemistry set. See? If you pour the white powder into the test tube and add four drops of this liquid, the whole thing smokes and turns red!
Monsanto found that its researches could pull apart plant DNA strands like so many accordions, insert genetic material and then shove the DNA back together again. Sweet! In one arena, such knowledge allowed the company to splice corn genes with those of a bacteria that can kill corn earworms. Then they started charging farmers real money to “license” the special corn’s seeds – just like a Microsoft product!
Only whoops! it turns out Mother Nature has an even bigger chemistry set, and started cranking out badass corn earworms that are unaffected by the bacteria-laced corn genes. It also turns out that while Monsanto was playing with its DNA toys, it spilt designer genes all over the hemisphere.
But Monsanto lawyers and lobbyists got together and, after a lot of creative thinking and the planting of some seed money, some really interesting laws were passed. Now, if the bees fly from a Monsanto designer-gene soybean field and pollinate your plain-Jane-genes soybean field, sprinkling designer DNA into the seeds you’ve saved just like always for decades and generations – Voila! You are now in illegal possession of Monsanto DNA, and you owe the company a buttload of money.
Ain’t American ingenuity great?
So meanwhile, Monsanto has been making this cool weed-killer called Roundup, see? And since they learned how to splice genes and all, they just spliced some Roundup resistance into their sooper-dooper corn and soybean and cotton seeds and whatnot. Then, they sell the farmers the rad weed killer that strips out all the vegetation in sight, AND they sell farmers the license to use the seeds from the corn, soybeans, cotton and whatnot with the Roundup-resistant DNA.
So Monsanto makes a double sale off of everybody, plus the farmers don’t have to plow up the dirt anymore – they can just pour on the weed-killing chemicals and follow right behind with the Sooper Seeds.
Except Whoa! here’s that damn Mother Nature disrespecting seed licenses and plant patents again:
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
Never fear for long, though, because Monsanto and the other chemistry-set kids just know they can outsmart God if they put their collective minds to it.
Bayer is already selling cotton and soybeans resistant to glufosinate, another weedkiller. Monsanto’s newest corn is tolerant of both glyphosate and glufosinate, and the company is developing crops resistant to dicamba, an older pesticide. Syngenta is developing soybeans tolerant of its Callisto product. And Dow Chemical is developing corn and soybeans resistant to 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War.
That’s right, buddy. If Mother Nature wants to mess with Big Ag, then Big Ag is gonna go all Agent Orange on her ass. ‘Cause deliverin’ cheap high-fructose corn syrup for soda-pop ‘n ketchup ‘n cattle feed ‘n near every other “prepared” food in America is Job One.
No matter what the cost…
To you.
→ B.Dunn, May 04, 2010, 07 29 AM
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We Have Met The Enemy, Again
(Factory Food • Nature)
…and he is still us:
The report warned that farmers were jeopardizing the benefits by planting too many so-called Roundup Ready crops. These crops are genetically engineered to be impervious to the herbicide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray the chemical to kill weeds while leaving the crops unscathed.Overuse of this seductively simple approach to weed control is starting to backfire. Use of Roundup, or its generic equivalent, glyphosate, has skyrocketed to the point that weeds are rapidly becoming resistant to the chemical. That is rendering the technology less useful, requiring farmers to start using additional herbicides, some of them more toxic than glyphosate.
→ B.Dunn, Apr 13, 2010, 11 46 AM
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